Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO of AdMob, poses at his company’s offices.

“The Federal Trade Commission has voted 5-0 to close its investigation of Google’s proposed acquisition of AdMob. The decision was a difficult one because the parties currently are the two leading mobile advertising networks, and the Commission was concerned about the loss of head-to-head competition between them.”

A 5-0 vote doesn’t sound as though it was difficult, and yet the FTC seems almost disappointed in characterizing the decision. Certainly, concerns about the acquisition affecting competition were legitimate when the deal first was announced. A note this month from Credit Suisse analysts said the FTC was looking at data that suggested Google and AdMob would combine to take up 75% of the market for mobile display ads.

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“The Commission reached this decision based on important developments in the mobile advertising marketplace, particularly actions by Apple that should mitigate the anticompetitive effects of Google’s AdMob acquisition.”

This is why the decision was unanimous, in the end. Apple moved in and changed the game.

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“Google’s proposed $750 million acquisition of AdMob necessitated close scrutiny because the transaction appeared likely to lead to a substantial lessening of competition in violation of Section 7 of the Clayton Act. Those companies generate the most revenue among mobile advertising networks … The Commission’s six-month investigation yielded evidence that each of the merging parties viewed the other as its primary competitor, and that each firm made business decisions in direct response to this perceived competitive threat.”

The regulation that the FTC is talking about prohibits monopolistic practices such as price discrimination and mergers that decrease competition. The way the FTC is phrasing this shows that it considers the market for these mobile-phone ads to be a separate advertising market, even from online ads — perhaps an indication of what many people see as the growth potential of ads on cellphones.

If the FTC had looked not at the market for mobile ads but instead at the market for advertising in general, or for Internet-based advertising, it would have found that Google and AdMob combined to make up a much smaller part of the ad world and could have concluded that the deal didn’t represent a monopolization threat.

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“During the investigation, Apple acquired the third largest mobile ad network, Quattro Wireless, in December 2009 and then introduced its own mobile advertising network, iAd, as part of its iPhone applications package. The Commission has reason to believe that Apple quickly will become a strong mobile advertising network competitor.”

And the competition between Apple and Google comes to the forefront yet again. When Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the company’s iAd platform, he said Apple had specifically tried to buy AdMob and then purchased Quattro after Google stepped in.

“Google came in and snatched them from us because they didn’t want us to have it,” he said of AdMob. “We bought Quattro, and we’re learning as fast as we can, but we’re babes in the woods [in the advertising market].”

Google and Apple have been sniping at each other in recent months; at the iAd event, Mr. Jobs also said Google’s mobile operating system, Android, had a “porn store” on it. And this week, Google repeatedly took shots at Apple, making references to Apple’s decisions to limit software such as Flash on its phones as being part of “a future we don’t want.”

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“Apple not only has extensive relationships with application developers and users, but also is able to offer targeted ads (heretofore a strength of AdMob) by leveraging proprietary user data gleaned from users of Apple mobile devices. Furthermore, Apple’s ownership of the iPhone software development tools, and its control over the developers’ license agreement, gives Apple the unique ability to define how competition among ad networks on the iPhone will occur and evolve.”

The FTC here is devoting a lot of space to Apple, considering that the decision is about a non-Apple deal and Apple hasn’t even rolled out the software in question yet. Is this a hint? The Journal reported previously that the FTC and the Department of Justice were considering an investigation of Apple’s contract with iPhone software developers, in which it prevents them from using certain non-Apple development tools and prevents their iPhone applications from sending this “proprietary user data” to other ad networks. The FTC is demonstrating here that it has been following what Apple is doing.

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“Android and iPhone compete against each other as platforms, and the availability of free or low-cost applications helps drive that competition. Thus, Google has a strong incentive to encourage the development of applications on Android to maintain the competitiveness of Android against the iPhone. As discussed above, these applications are often made available to consumers in their current low- or no-cost form through advertising provided by mobile ad networks like AdMob. To the extent Google were to exercise market power on Android after this acquisition, it would risk making Android less competitive against the iPhone and other platforms.”

The FTC is raising an interesting point here. For all the talk about the focus on mobile ads, the fight also is about the phones themselves. These companies are using free applications as a major selling point for their phones, and any action that makes those free apps less likely — like limiting the revenue that software makers can get through ads — hurts a phone’s chances in the marketplace.

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“In any nascent market there will be uncertainty about the path of competition and the durability of early leads in market share. In order to fully protect consumers, however, the Commission must subject mergers in nascent markets to the same level of antitrust scrutiny as mergers in other markets, taking into account all relevant information that becomes available during the course of an investigation. Had the facts supported a challenge here, the Commission would not have hesitated to act to preserve competition in the mobile ad network market.

“Though we have determined not to take action today, the Commission will continue to monitor the mobile marketplace to ensure a competitive environment and to protect the interests of consumers.”

Google and others have pointed out during the entire process that the market for mobile ads is so new that it’s difficult to judge whether one set of players is dominating in a monopolistic way; today’s monopoly in such a market could be tomorrow’s also-ran.

Still, the Google-AdMob deal was seen as an early test of the Obama administration’s enforcement of antitrust regulations. Anything involving Google these days is high-profile, and the FTC wants to make it clear that it still has its eye on the company and the fast-changing market in general.